Malaria, star­va­tion, ran­dom bomb­ings are some of the things the hos­pi­tals in Mogadishu, Soma­lia have to treat. Lack of water, mos­qui­toes every where and few equip­ment and med­i­cines only com­pound the dif­fi­cul­ties for the med­ical staff.

From this essay that we found at Reuters Alert Net, OXFAM worker Has­san Noor tells us what he encoun­tered at one of Mogadishu’s hospitals.

But Mogadishu is not like most other cities. In a room in Med­ina hos­pi­tal lay the dead body of a middle-aged man, so hor­rif­i­cally dis­fig­ured that his griev­ing fam­ily could not even con­firm whether it was their father and hus­band. The man had left his home early that morn­ing to go to work — just as mil­lions of fathers do every morn­ing all over the world. But as he walked down the street, he was hit by a rocket mor­tar. His head exploded and he died instantly. There was noth­ing the doc­tors at Med­ina could do.

This kind of indis­crim­i­nate shelling has had a dev­as­tat­ing effect on the city. In the past month, about 20,000 peo­ple have fled Mogadishu — ear­lier this year, thou­sands were flee­ing every day. But many still remain — and as the fight­ing and des­per­ate poverty con­tin­ues, hos­pi­tals like Med­ina are more impor­tant than ever.

The lack of proper equip­ment and the incred­i­ble pres­sure on doc­tors all over Mogadishu can have dev­as­tat­ing consequences.

Iqro Asdi Adah, a seven-year-old girl at Banaadir, was severely wounded by stray bul­lets as she and her fam­ily tried to flee the city. As they scram­bled her to a makeshift road­side clinic, doc­tors tried to save her, but in the process acci­den­tally gave her the wrong blood trans­fu­sion. She is now stay­ing at Med­ina, where she lives in con­stant agony, her face and skin dis­fig­ured and scarred, and the nurses try their best to ease her pain as her mother begs for any­one to help.

A few months ago, Oxfam and our local part­ners, along with a cou­ple of other organ­i­sa­tions, began work at these hos­pi­tals. We deliv­ered some basic but life-saving med­i­cines, and some mos­quito nets to help pro­tect sick patients from malaria. Since then, we have built a new water tank in Med­ina to ensure the hos­pi­tal has a flow­ing sup­ply of clean water, and helped ren­o­vate some of the wards in Banaadir hos­pi­tal — fix­ing win­dows and latrines. We are about to pro­vide 400 beds to Banaadir for chil­dren there — this will be the biggest such deliv­ery the hos­pi­tal has received since the start of the civil war.

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